under their hoofs, which caused good Ambroise great pity, and made
him wish himself back in Paris. Going into a stable he saw four dead
soldiers, and three desperately wounded, placed with their backs against
the wall. An old campaigner came up.--"Can these fellows get well?" he
said. "No!" answered the surgeon. Thereupon, the old soldier walked up
to them and cut all their throats, sweetly, and without wrath (doulcement
et sans cholere). Ambroise told him he was a bad man to do such a thing.
"I hope to God;" he said, "somebody will do as much for me if I ever get
into such a scrape" (accoustre de telle facon). "I was not much salted
in those days" (bien doux de sel), says Ambroise, "and little acquainted
with the treatment of wounds." However, as he tells us, he proceeded to
apply boiling oil of Sambuc (elder) after the approved fashion of the
time,--with what torture to the patient may be guessed. At last his
precious oil gave out, and he used instead an insignificant mixture of
his own contrivance. He could not sleep that night for fear his patients
who had not been scalded with the boiling oil would be poisoned by the
gunpowder conveyed into their wounds by the balls. To his surprise, he
found them much better than the others the next morning, and resolved
never again to burn his patients with hot oil for gun-shot wounds.

This was the beginning, as nearly as we can fix it, of that reform which
has introduced plain water-dressings in the place of the farrago of
external applications which had been a source of profit to apothecaries
and disgrace to art from, and before, the time when Pliny complained of
them. A young surgeon who was at Sudley Church, laboring among the
wounded of Bull Run, tells me they had nothing but water for dressing,
and he (being also doux de sel) was astonished to see how well the wounds
did under that simple treatment.

Let me here mention a fact or two which may be of use to some of you who
mean to enter the public service. You will, as it seems, have gun-shot
wounds almost exclusively to deal with. Three different surgeons, the
one just mentioned and two who saw the wounded of Big Bethel, assured me
that they found no sabre-cuts or bayonet wounds. It is the rifle-bullet
from a safe distance which pierces the breasts of our soldiers, and not
the gallant charge of broad platoons and sweeping squadrons, such as we
have been in the habit of considering the chosen mode of warfare of
ancient and